The Pleasure Diet: Can food journaling help you lose weight?

Conventional wisdom holds that writing down what you eat is one of the most effective ways to lose weight. Indeed, at SELF, we recommend that people who want to be more aware of what they're putting in their mouth keep track of their meals and snacks for at least a few weeks because often, we think we're eating a lot less than we really are. (Oh, I forgot those handfuls of raisins and nuts I scarfed at the kitchen sink last night!) And when I first started on my Pleasure Diet journey, I was diligent about writing everything down. My nutritionist, Marissa Lippert, recommended it and it worked for me. In fact, it worked so well, that I felt as if I was in a groove and didn't need to write my foods down anymore. Voila--the weight loss stopped (though at least I didn't gain).

So last week, I mentioned to my mindful eating guru, Jean Kristeller (you know her by now, so maybe I should just call her Guru Jean!), that I wanted to start keeping a food diary again. But the question is: Does food journaling live up to the tenets of the Pleasure Diet? Does it promote mindful eating? On first glance, the answer would seem to be yes. After all, if you’re writing down what you’re eating, you’re thinking about it and aware of it and mindful of it, right? But Jean injected a note of caution: “Writing down what you eat can be fine,” she told me, “but I’ve also seen people use food journaling as a way to be mindless about their food.” How can that be? I wondered. She explained that for some dieters, when they write down what they eat, it’s almost as if they’re being accountable to a third person and then don’t really have to think about it. It’s a way of making themselves be “good” and unfortunately, that’s part of a dieting mentality. So when they stop writing down what they eat, they begin to gain weight again.

I felt skeptical, so I asked her whether there was a way to use a food journal as a helpful tool, rather than as a “whip” (her word, not mine). “The trick is to use journaling as a way of cultivating mindfulness, responsibility and self regulation–not as a way of saying, okay, as long as I’m writing things down, I don’t have to think about it.” I hear that: The point is to develop habits that last a lifetime, that don’t feel like part of a diet but rather, feel like part of life. That way, there’s no going off the diet, no being bad, no rule breaking.